美国教育的深奥不是几句话就能说清楚的，从基础的社区大学，LAC, 四年制大学，硕士级大学，博士级大学，种类繁多的大学让中国家长和学生挑花了眼。

 

的确美国的大学是没有一个官方的排名，各种杂志和报刊倒是有很多的排名花样。其中以US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT 为最盛。其实，这个报道也有他的局限之处，并不适合一概而论。尤其申请本科类的孩子，究竟这个学校的科研力量如何，发表论文数量的多少实际上跟我们去读书没什么关系，既然没什么关系的东西，我们又何必一再的执迷不悟呢，当你打开USNEW AND WORLD REPORT 的链接，http://www.usnews.com/。希望更多的看你是属于哪一个类型的申请者，不要光瞄准NATIONAL UNIVERSITY ranking。

我给大家介绍一种平常我们可能没有注意到的一种排名--卡耐基分类法。这个对于申请研究生的学生会非常有帮助。

Carnegie Classifications 
For three decades, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has led the way in providing a classification scheme for American Higher Education.  Carnegie Classifications are the leading framework for describing institutional diversity in US higher education. The Classifications have been widely used in the study of higher education, both as a way to represent and control for institutional differences. While the Classifications are not a ranking system, they do provide tremendous guidance for those students in making informed choices. 
 
Although the Carnegie Classification’s purpose is primarily to assist those conducting research on higher education, they can be invaluable to academic advisors who are seeking to identify comparable institutions, and institutions of various types, for their students. By providing a set of distinct classifications, as well as a set of online tools for creating custom listings (combining categories within classifications, identifying institutions in similar categories across classifications, or filtering listings by selected criteria), academic counselors now have much greater analytic flexibility, allowing them to match classification
tools to their needs.